Your New York Film Festival: As Close As We’ll Ever Get to the pre-New Times Village Voice Getting the Band Back Together

Last week, The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced their line-up for this fall’s New York Film Festival, as ever a greatest-hits assemblage of the year on the festival circuit. (As always, we’ll be covering as many of the films as possible right here at thelmagazine.com.) This year sees a noted absence of the usual big-name mid-career global auteurs and upper-middlebrow star-driven American film (only, really, Haneke and Almodovar, and no Little Children or Married Life-type head-scratchers), and a preponderance of old masters and daunting French ladies, foreign pop, and a greater-than-usual number of new foreign festival-fave filmmakers, intellectually rigorous set-ups, and movies from countries not exactly known for producing marquee world cinema.

Holdovers from last year are Richard Peña, the FSLC’s program director; J. Hoberman, lead critic at the Voice for the last few decades and dean of NYC moviegoing; and Scott Foundas, the young lead critic of the L.A. Weekly (and thus a major contributor to the Voice and other New Times properties, too).

Lisa Schwarzbaum, of Entertainment Weekly, was on the committee last year, but her term expired. She was replaced by Melissa Anderson, a former (and, now that her Film Editor position at Time Out New York has been eliminated, current again) Village Voice contributor, who also writes for Artforum and elsewhere, about things like queer cinema and adventurous foreign fare.

The other change from last year’s committee is less about different tastes than about personality: when selection committee member Kent Jones left the FSLC to “pursue other options” and “spark several rounds of panicked speculation about what kind of blighted new corporate culture could lead someone to abandon a gig as sweet as the gig Kent Jones had at the FSLC”, he and his inimitable taste were replaced by the equally singular Dennis Lim — who happens to be Hobes and Anderson’s old editor at the Voice, before he was let go following the paper’s merger with the New Times. This was so that he could keep them company, and, we’re speculating, form a cool-kid alt-weekly clique that Foundas would want to join. (Film criticism, like every other profession, is exactly like high school.) So what we have here is an New York Film Festival lineup that — in its global reach, cultivation of niche auteurs and highbrow cred — looks a lot like the annual Best Of series the Voice used to curate at BAM every spring during the Lim years, before the alt-weekly merger caused everything to go to shit.

The TONY film section is now “edited by David Fear”, whatever that means; Fear was previously one of two staff film critics with Joshua Rothkopf; since Anderson’s been let go more bylines are now handled by freelancers, and Keith Uhlich, who’s apparently on staff there as well, though I’m fuzzy on the nature of the position. The Film Editor gig wasn’t entirely eliminated, but it’s my understanding, based upon what was said around the time of her departure, that they rearranged the way the section works. (Here, though it’s by no means definitive: http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/archive&hellip;) All this seemed simpler than saying “They fired here, or rather they downsized her, and hired somebody else, and now somebody does sort of the same job under sort of the same title.”

I condensed all that, in the post, because I couldn’t imagine that anybody but me would care about the logistics of a magazine film section and film-critic inside baseball. I see I was wrong, which is nice.